


it’s only slaughter (we’re only liars, it’s only love)

by possibilist



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F, children goodbye, sorry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-06 20:47:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5430284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibilist/pseuds/possibilist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'“Fuck you,” you tell her, and she nods, and your skin burns in all the places you want her to touch you, and her eyes are green, young, eternal, and yours sting with tears like smoke.' // drabble w lots of angst & minimal efforts at plot based off of the s3 trailer</p>
            </blockquote>





	it’s only slaughter (we’re only liars, it’s only love)

**Author's Note:**

> theres so much that happened sorry

 

**it’s only slaughter (we’re only liars, it’s only love)**

.

_i heard the news today / that you’re not mine to keep / don’t struggle too much now / while i kill you in your sleep / i heard the news today / that you’re not mine to save / i hope that you’re comfortable / in that quiet lasting grave_  
—ODESZA, ‘it’s only’

//

It feels good to hold an knife to her throat. You have dreamt of this moment, actually, which you prefer much, much more than the dreams you have of rotting bodies, of screams, of how your hand didn’t even shake—not a single tremble—when you pulled that lever. 

It feels good to press your body roughly against hers and it feels good to look at her mouth and you want to _consume_ her in all the ways another person could; you want her jaws, her teeth, the marrow from her bones like the Mountain Men were so ready to take from both of your people. You want her cut open and flayed out and you want your fingers inside her at the tenderest part; you want to taste her and you want to kiss her hard enough to draw blood and soft enough to ache like a lost lover should.

“Do it,” she says, and it’s a command and prayer and plea, rough and stilted and strong, and the bob of her throat hits the knife just right that you draw a precise, thin line of blood. You almost expect her to bleed gold but it’s the crimson of her sash, the crimson staining your hands whenever you close your eyes. “Clarke,” she says, “do it.”

You press harder for one moment, two, and then step back with a sigh. Your whole left arm hurts, up into your chest, like there are roots from your heart spreading out and all of your nerves are being dug up at once, and you wonder if this is why Lexa has tattoos, if this kind of ache is translated with needles into her skin; you had seen her undress once, on accident, and she was beautiful.

“Fuck you,” you tell her, and she nods, and your skin burns in all the places you want her to touch you, and her eyes are green, young, eternal, and yours sting with tears like smoke.

//

Polis is ornate, Lexa’s quarters especially. She is not deprived of luxury, you find out, although it’s a rough one, and you don’t wonder where she learned her dichotomies; she sleeps—small and young and always with guards that let you pass with all of your weapons and lie down beside her without a sound. She sleeps on furs and velvet and her skin is so profoundly soft, littered with scars. She smells like sweat and flowers and the first time you taste her, she isn’t sweet and she isn’t anything like _forbidden_ ; she is what you would look back for while you were supposed to destroy the world, the first woman and the last, and her body isn’t creation and it isn’t destruction: it’s something all the way between.

You spread her legs and she breathes her consent in some language that will never be your own, and your tongue is a knife and she splits before you. She tastes like salt.

//

You spend days, weeks, even, speaking of war. How to prevent it; how to win it. Lexa is guarded and beautiful and you find a rough palm in yours after the days have finished, after she takes off her armor and gloves and washes her face. 

Something has burned through the palm of her hand once, although she never tells you how or why; you imagine it must hurt constantly, and that’s partially why she wears gloves. She doesn't tell you about the scar—silver shining in the moonlight through her windows, stained glass, what used to be holy, you remember—that runs from her hip to her shoulder. She never speaks about the kill scars that litter her chest in neat lines. When you ride horses a few days later after there’s a disturbing scouting report, and you look over a bluff and there are bodies spread.

Lexa believes in souls, the recurrence of life, beauty, _being_. (“The bees of the invisible,” she told you one night, reverently in bed, “Do you know that passage?” You had said no, you had lied, although you’re not surprised Lexa loved Rilke; he wrote love poems, after all, and you do not want her saying them gently into your skin).

Lexa believes in reincarnation and you never wonder about the bubbled skin between her breasts that you have kissed, now, in dark, in secret, and everyone knows—you know they should taste like dirt, like graveyards and bones and bugs and _death_. 

But her skin tastes like flowers and you cannot bring yourself to conflate the two.

//

There is a ceremonial fight, and you think Lexa will lose, for just one moment, but she rolls away and is small and quick and fierce, and you never _forget_ how deadly she is, but you remember, in this moment, that she is utterly and ultimately lethal: she drives her sword through her opponent, hard, completely, enough for the hilt to be stained with blood. Her fingers stained with blood.

When you were younger, on the Ark, you learned of geography of the earth before the bombs. Of cities in juxtaposition, in flux. Drugs and murders and so many bodies without heads. There were verging places, borders, fences, ditches and tunnels and rivers and thousands of terrified souls Lexa thinks are still alive and dead and alive again. 

You ask her, after the fight, as you are tending to a slice down her spine, cutting the green bits of her tattoo in half like a machete—and you try to match them up again as best you can, to bring the forest back together neatly, like it was untouched in the first place—you ask her if she has ever wondered where your own spirit has come from.

“I have,” she confirms quietly, completely still under your hands, a needle, knots of thread. “Powerful, beautiful,” she says, “all too much like me.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” you say, and she grunts something like a laugh, and you smile, and it’s so foreign your lip splits straight down the middle.

//

You come to know her advisors, her assistants; you speak to your mother and Bellamy and Octavia and Raven and Jasper and Monty again. You have no home and you wonder what it is like to be a border, what it is like to belong to no one.

What it is like to belong to someone who can never have you, who is a space _between_ herself.

//

You are on your back and Lexa’s mouth is on your center and your hands are digging into the sharp winged-hollows just beneath her shoulder blades, scattered with scars like rivers and fault lines and lines on maps that don’t exist any longer, your nails hooks or worse, and you think—you _remember_ — _in this new country I am worse than the city of thousands dead, I am a wound red with iodine._

You draw blood and you suck bruises that bloom black and purple across her gold skin, tiny twilights of decay, and she always leaves your skin pristine, pale and ashen and pink, like she is afraid to disturb the stars.

//

There is war; there are more bodies, bombs, blood on your hands. Lexa’s gentleness is a constant, the way she whispers your name and tells you of goddesses. She never stops going into battle.

One day she doesn’t come back—not Lexa, not the girl with skin the color of the flecks of light in rocks along the river, not the girl with eyes paler than the ocean and with twice its might. She comes back on a stretcher with blood spilling from her mouth and arrows through her stomach and then—“I wanted to tell you,” she says, ragged, like the frayed end of a noose you know this will be for both of you, because her pulse is waning beneath your hands—“I wanted to tell you that—“ she sighs. “ _Ai hod you in_.”

You have wanted to hate her for lifetimes, you think, but she is going to die—there is nothing you can do, your hands are already sticky with the end of her life—and you will be hers forever. “I love you too,” you say.

She is with you for a few more quiet minutes, your hands woven, until hers go limp. You cry and one of her advisors holds you up; to sink to your knees would feel like you are dying too, and although the world spins and you cannot breathe, you do not fall.

She has told you about faith, those red lines, and when her fingers grow slack you feel that thread sliced from you.

Lexa doesn’t shine gold any longer and her blood dries red and flaky, the same as yours. You are full of rage; you are untethered.

//

In another world you may have had a life with her, one not full of war and bombs and flashes of something haunted in the light of her eyes in the middle of the night while she prayed as you touched her body. You remember the skittering of her body and the cities of churches, the stained glass, the curtains and the way she once laughed when you fed her seeds of pomegranate, your clothes still off, like you were girls in the beginning of holy books, at the beginning of the world.

You are in the middle, though, no ends and no sacredness and a child takes her place on the large thrown that you have come to know as hers.

You burn her body in a white pyre that night, all tradition and sacrifice. Her mother weaves flowers into her hair and you cannot bring yourself to kiss her one last time: she is cold and she has never been yours.

You pray with the rest of her people; you seep in their grief like a lifeline. 

You should’ve said more to her, should’ve drawn less blood and known she was going to die young: exquisite, small, all sharp elbows and hips and the press of a bird-boned ribcage. You wanted to take her marrow, once upon a time, but she took yours, took all the weight from you that kept you _here_.

You never meant to lose her.

Your voice is lost in the songs of the crowd as her body is scorched to ash. Your hands are webbed with the scars the earth have put there, and you paint her eyes just once before you put away your greens— _Verde que te quiero verde._

There are more ships and more horses and more poems, but there is a hollow so large you cannot see across. 

//

(“Do you think,” she had whispered one night, “that the moon is afraid to die?”

“It’s too late for this. I’m sleeping.”

“You have seen her rise, though?”

“What, the moon?”

“Yes,” she had said.

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes,” she’d told you, “nothing more.”)

//

(You remember later, what she had been trying to say, and only Lexa, sweet, brutal Lexa, could believe so fiercely in a felix culpa like this—

“Are you drunk?”

“Yes,” she’d said.

You had laughed, young and easy.

“You are beautiful,” she’d said.

“ _Lex_.”

She’d shaken her head.

“I have lived very long, eating fruit and dancing beneath the moon with you.”

“You’re so full of it.”

She had shrugged and lied down next to you silently, wrapped your body around hers, all soft skin and scars. A shrug, a very quiet, “It is so easy to die,” and then you are kissing the nape of her neck as she had fallen asleep.)

//

When you dream you forget about maps and you remember her hands. That is all you have left of her.

There was never going to be any other ending than this.

 

**Author's Note:**

> find me @possibilistfanfiction on tumblr


End file.
